I needed an easy read and this definitely was one, evidenced by the fact I read it in eight days even though I was trying to get through a magazine at the same time!
Three women, unknown to each other, have valentines plans, but are stood up, all by a man by the name of Joseph Carter. Each of their stories begins there, and we see what happens over the following year.
It’s easy to read, engaging, becoming addictive later on, and I very much enjoyed it – great bank holiday weekend read!
I’d wanted to read this for ages, and then suddenly a friend was offering to lend it to me, so I jumped at the chance.
It’s not a happy read, the whole way through, you are pummelled with negative stories and stats, that make you realise just how far we still have to go; there’s not a lot of celebrating progress made. The afterword talks a little about what can be done to improve things, but I think it might have made the book a little less harrowing if this was sprinkled more throughout.
That said, it felt like a very important read, it’s a reality. And it’s not just one person blindly sharing their opinion, it’s incredibly well researched; at the back of the book are 70 pages of references used! (Which gives an added bonus of the book not being quite as long as you first think it’s going to be!)
The author talks a lot about the “gender data gap”, this is when studies/designers/anyone just use data from men and assume it’s the same for women, or use data of both genders but don’t disaggregate it to look for differences between the two. But this isn’t right, because being equal doesn’t mean being the same.
Most of the content can be summarised in three main themes, the female body and its invisibility, male sexual violence against women, and unpaid care work.
A few quotes to give you a flavour:
The next in my go through Philippa Gregory’s Tudor novels, easily the most famous, the only one I’m aware of that’s been made into a film, and characters that feel a little more familiar than in the last couple of books I’d read, which I guess made it a little easier to read.
That said, it’s still over 500 pages, and small font, so it took me about 6 weeks to read – not good for my Goodreads targets at all!
We all know Anne Boleyn as the second wife of Henry VIII, but this is the story of the affair her sister Mary had with him first, followed by the story we know better, but with other strings to its bow too.
Some people are critical of the historical accuracy of Gregory’s Tudor fiction, and yes, the conversations and how things happened are clearly imagined. However, some things that happened in this book were truly shocking and so as soon as I finished I opened up our friend Wikipedia, and found that the basic facts were indeed true.
The further I got through the book, the more hooked I became. And now I write this with the film on in the background, which has a ridiculous number of famous people in it, let’s see how it goes….
I would say very similar comments to the second book in this series: a quick read, hard to keep track of the characters due to it being a script so no descriptions, and didn’t really care about the plot a lot. It’s fine, but just…. I dunno.
The only thing this had on the other two books, was that the book contained several illustrations, a mixture of costume sketches, renderings of scenery, designs for props, which did give a bit more of a feel of where you were. I wonder if it was managed by someone different to have this, as it also didn’t have the pretty cover the first two books had! It also seems to have an additional author who wasn’t on the first two.
I wanted to read it because I don’t like to leave a series half done, but I think it might be time to admit I should just stick to the original seven Harry Potter books…..
Another great book from Jonas Jonasson, I’m a big fan!
It took me a while to get into this time – he does seem to have a habit of giving each character a very full and detailed back story, each of which are entertaining, but it can feel a bit jumping all over the place early on in the book as we meet everyone in turn, but once the main story got going it was great fun as per usual.
An estranged (without knowing it) son and an ex-wife of the same man, and seeking revenge, stumble across a business which sets out to do exactly that for people. Chaos ensues, there’s not much more to say without giving the fun away!
Some out of context quotes to give a feel for it:
A couple who’s daughter has gone off on a gap year realised they could save a fortune by just skipping Christmas that year, and spend it on a cruise instead.
This means no decorations, no parties, no food, no presents. Needless to say, friends and neighbours are not impressed, particularly neighbours who try to be the best decorated street in the town! Chaos obviously ensues.
This is the book that the film “Christmas with the Kranks” was based on – I’ve not seen it, but the trailer seems to make it a bit more extreme and slapstick, which is fair enough.
It’s a fun book, nothing like Grisham’s normal stuff – and only 200 pages! I really enjoyed it, would recommend.
The only thing I’d change is to remove two unnecessary sentences about skin colour – the book is only 22 years old, but it seems things have changed even in that time…
The second in Matt Haig’s Christmas trilogy, I correct myself slightly on what I said last year – the books are not completely separate. The boy in the first book is the adult Father Christmas in this book, but while there are a few call backs, it’s really not dependent on having read it, this stands alone well.
This is set in Victorian England, and as it’s a children’s book, of course we bump into Charles Dickens at one point, and crash into Queen Victoria’s bedroom in another (where she is sat up in bed wearing her crown – naturally).
The book follows the story of Amelia Wishart, a chimney sweep who early on loses her mother and is taken to the workhouse by a horrible man. This runs parallel to Father Christmas dealing with the lack of hope in the world and therefore lack of magic to power his sleigh, this is partly due a troll attack that stopped him from delivering last year at all!
So there’s a lot going on, the two stories obviously meet and overlap, and everything’s alright in the end.
I picked this up as a way to give myself a quick overview of lots of things I didn’t know. I didn’t like history at school (with a couple of exceptions for the Tudors and Victorians), but thought it would be good to give myself a basic education.
I don’t think this book was the right choice. A lot of the pages seemed to have a load of assumed knowledge on people/places/scenarios, so I didn’t have a clue what they were on about, there wasn’t enough explanation. It also had a large number of typos that a basic spell check would have picked up on, which made me question the quality of what I was reading too. Most pages had an illustration, be it photo, diagram, painting, but they were all in black and white, so when it was a map with a key, it was very hard to distinguish between various shades of grey.
It starts with pre-history and goes right through to the 2008 credit crunch. I particularly struggled with the early stuff, cos I found that I just didn’t care enough, which meant I had a negative attitude through most of the book, and combined with the quality issues mentioned above, I’m just very relieved to have got to the end and ticked it off – it took me a month! Not a book I’ll be keeping.
I bought this book a few years ago I think, when I visited Hampton Court Palace, and thought it’d be interesting, but only just got around to reading it. Each king or queen has a double page spread with a picture or two, a quick fact file, “what kind of ruler?”, palace connections (because it’s published by Historic Royal Palaces (HRP)), and then some more wordy bits of info to give you an idea of their key points.
It was mostly good, definitely a decent way to get a general overview, or quickly look up someone specific. Just a couple of things bothered me:
Firstly, in my reading I found 2 typos and a sentence that had been written really clumsily, it just felt like it could have done with one more proof read.
Secondly, while this edition was published in 2016, and so obviously one monarch out of date, it refers early on to male succession without acknowledging that that law changed in 2013 and so is no longer the case (but does talk about Richard III being discovered in a car park that year, so the text has definitely been updated since then!).
The other thing that was a bit odd (but understandable) was the focus on their links with Kensington, the Tower of London, Hampton Court, and the couple of other properties under HRP, with links to other palaces (eg Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle) practically ignored, just a bit of a heavy weighting.
That all said, for me, as someone who really struggled with history at school, but would like to know a bit more now, this was pitched just right. Some high level details, enough basics for what you might want to know without being a heavy read. Bingo.
Another of the books that I’d seen everywhere, people seemed to rave about, it was on the shelf in the supermarket, so I grabbed it to try, and I’m glad I did!
It’s the 1950s and Elizabeth Zott is a scientist, specifically a chemist. It’s not an easy time to be a woman in science. She meets a man, a few things happen, which I won’t spoil, though he does get her into rowing, and then a few years later we find her as a single mother and unemployed. She ends up hosting a cooking show on TV, (because of course, cooking is just chemistry), but goes a lot more science-y and a lot less girly than her producers would like! There is so much more to it than this, but I don’t want to give too much away.
Her dog, “six thirty” is one of my favourite things about the book, she decides she’s going to teach him words, hundreds by the end of it, which sounds ridiculous, but it somehow seems reasonable, because after all, dogs are clever creatures! Sometimes the book tells things from the dogs perspective, and somehow it’s just the most heart warming parts of the book!
I really enjoyed this, have already passed it on for my mum to read!
One of my measures of writing I’ve enjoyed is when I’ve turned down a load of page corners, which I did with this, so here are some of my favourite lines:
“She certainly didn’t like favours. Favours smacked of cheating.”
“She continued to believe that all it took to get through life was grit. Sure grit was critical, but it also took luck, and if luck wasn’t available, then help. Everyone needed help.”
“People were always insisting they knew what [fiction] meant, even if the writer hadn’t meant that at all, and even if what they thought it meant had no actual meaning.”
“Not that there was anything wrong with being unattractive. She was unattractive and she knew it. […] But none of them were – or would ever be – ugly. Only [he] was ugly, and that was because he was unattractive on the inside.”
“As you well know, humans are biologically programmed to sleep twice a day – a siesta in the afternoon, then eight hours of sleep at night.”
“‘Sure as death and taxes.’
‘Everybody dies. […] But not everyone pays their taxes.'”
“‘I think we both know, […] that God is just a bit different from Yahtzee.'”
“‘All dogs have the ability to bite. […] Just as all humans have the ability to cause harm. The trick is to act in a reasonable way so that harm becomes unnecessary.'”
“The unrelenting burden of misunderstanding” – this sums up so much of the book, give it a go and you’ll see!
ineke.co.uk 